Cornel West
speaker
48 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Cornel West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, first, I want to just thank you for having both of us. God bless you and your precious family. But no, we're fundamentally committed to a pursuit of truth. We recognize that we're cracked vessels, we're fallible and fallen. But truth is bigger than all of us, just like beauty is, just like God is, just like goodness is.
and to be able to spend these 20 years with my dear, dear brother, Ravi, though I have a deep love of my brother. Love is not reducible to politics, and brotherhood and friendship is not reducible to being correct on political issues. I think brother Ravi's wrong on a whole host of things. He thinks I'm wrong on a whole host of things, but I can revel in his humanity.
And I can take seriously the counter arguments he has against me. I think it cuts deeper than civility, though, Charlie. It's really a matter of humanity. And it also has much to do with what it means to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. We can get into that later.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Brother Robbie pushes me against the wall and makes me come up with specific ways in which markets themselves may have virtues that I may have downplayed. And I push him against the wall and he begins to see the crucial role of government and the need to balance. But fundamentally, see, Robbie and I are abolitionists. In terms of we want the abolition of poverty.
We want the abolition of cowardliness. We want the abolition of dogmatism, the abolition of tribalism. We know it will never happen because human beings are human beings, but we can fight against it. Philosophically, I thought that Vico was the greatest Italian philosopher in the history of all time. He's convinced me now that Aquinas is.
I've always had a great appreciation of Aquinas, but what does that mean? Well, Robbie is a Catholic and I'm very much a hang loose Baptist. And therefore I had to have an appreciation. of the Catholic traditions. And we've struggled over claims about faith and grace and what have you. So it's philosophical, it's theological, and it's political.
On abortion, for example, we've had sustained discussions and debates on abortion. And he pushes me against the wall and I try to push him against the wall in a loving way. We just want to make sure that we are true to the Imago Dei each day.
precious human being made in the image of a loving and almighty God and therefore have a certain sanctity and dignity that the world didn't give them and the world can't take away. We take very seriously that Christian practice and our Christian faith.
And therefore, when we talk about gays and lesbians or trans or what have you, it's not out of hate, even as we have disagreements in terms of what kind of practices ought to be enacted. That's the crucial thing that I love about Robbie. He says what he means, means what he says, and he's got an integrity. He's got a compassion. And that makes a difference, my brother, Charlie.
Yes, powerful question though, brother. There's truth, capital T, that none of us have access to, and there's truth, small t's that we have access to, but we have to recognize we could be wrong. And he claims we put forward a fallacy. Now, as a Christian, you know, I believe that Jesus Christ
is the truth, the fleshification, the concretization of truth, and that is in the form of a love that has the capacity to transform who we are. So I'll make a radical distinction between love of power versus power of truth. But the truth itself, capital T, none of us have access to. We look through a... that lends darkly. So we have to have a humility.
The way to truth requires humility, maturity, but endless quest for truth, making sense of the world and hooking up with reality. So you can imagine, we could have a whole seminar on that question, what is truth? But that's just the beginning of an answer, my dear brother.
Oh, oh, absolutely. Because they believe that that relativistic claim itself is true.
And you tell them when they die, their death is itself a reality. That is true. There's coming a time when they die. That's a fundamental truth they cannot deny. So in that sense, there's a contradiction for them to be relativistic. Contextual is different than relativistic because we all have a context. That's why we are fallen and fallible.
And that's why we're crack vessels trying to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts. But the humility and the maturity is crucial. And that's what I think Ravi and I... Always stress humility, maturity, fallibility, openness, and might never makes right, even though might is always seemingly in the driver's seat.
No, I mean, unfortunately, it isn't what it ought to be, my brother, that every university in any historical moment has its own forms of orthodoxy and dogmatism. And you can have a dogmatism of the right, a dogmatism of the center, a dogmatism of the left. Robbie and I are committed to Socratic energy. We don't believe in safe spaces in universities.
When you enter a space, you ought to be unsettled and unnerved and unearthed. You ought to be willing to be critical and self-critical, just like when you have a conversation with the other brothers and sisters. They need to be unsettled and they need to unsettle you. Mediate it with respect, though. Mediate it with respect. And we don't have that.
Unfortunately, the way we ought in our universities, as you know, I'm in the situation. I got pushed out of Harvard myself because of my commitment to the Palestinian cause, not because I'm anti-Semitic. I love my Jewish brothers and sisters. But as a Christian, I want a Palestinian baby to have the exact value as any other baby, Israeli, black, white, red, whatever.
Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red or yellow, black or white. They are precious in his sight. I believe that literally. And therefore, I don't want any kind of orthodoxy of a left, right or whatever. We want Socratic action mediated with respect. But then as Christians, you know, we got something that the world believes is foolish and absurd.
We're going to love everybody, beginning especially with the least of these. That's what the biblical text says to me. And I believe it.
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